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How the Code War Has Replaced the Cold War
An anonymous reader writes "After years on the defensive, governments are building their own offensive capabilities to deliver digital attacks against their enemies. It's all part of a secret arms race, where countries spend billions of dollars to create stockpiles of digital weapons and zero-day flaws. But is this making us any safer, or putting us and the internet at risk? 'Estonia is a small state with a population of just 1.3 million. However, it has a highly-developed online infrastructure, having invested heavily in e-government services, digital ID cards, and online banking. ... The attacks on Estonia were a turning point, proving that a digital bombardment could be used not just to derail a company or a website, but to attack a country. Since then, many nations have been scrambling to improve their digital defenses -- and their digital weapons. While the attacks on Estonia used relatively simple tools against a small target, bigger weapons are being built to take on some of the mightiest of targets.'"
Since they seem destined to exist I hope that the cyber weapons being built have adequate safeguards against their misuse or accidental use.
Cyber warfare is worse than submarine warfare in terms of being able to identify an attacker. It provides the means for potentially anonymous devastating attacks. How will the world react to that?
Cyber arms control will be difficult to achieve, at best, maybe impossible.
Will a "Cyber Geneva Convention" be needed? No attacking hospitals, etc.?
How will organized crime and black hats fit into this framework? Will they be in the new era what pirates were in the 1700s - 1800s?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
wasn't so downright negligent in their race to adopt new technology, most of the problem would not exist.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Only if done properly. If you allow your people to insert random storage devices between the systems then you are still vulnerable. One example using the mistakes made in the separation is Stuxnet.
How does mass surveillance of private communications prevent DDOS attacks?
Blackhats are on the same "side" from the perspective of the innocent people they are attacking, even when they fight against each other.
Stockpiles of exploits? Sounds like some reporter is out of his/her depth and can't understand the difference between physical weapon stockpiles and software vulnerabilities. Welcome to the new Yellow Journalism. FUD, FUD and more FUD.
E-stoners.
If cyber "war" has replaced nuclear war then that is an excellent trade. Even John Kerry was waxing nostalgic for the Cold War the other day. What a joke! Are people that dumb? Have we so quickly forgotten what it was like to face a REAL threat of annihilation and actual global destruction? I would take another 9/11 over another Cuban Missile Crisis any day of the week. Let alone some computer hacking.
Instead of global thermonuclear war, we now have to worry about WoW going down. Seems like a good tradeoff to me.
I can't tell whether you're being serious or sarcastic.
Yes, he hurt the attack side, which is the side we don't actually need. Give the military and spook budget to security research, and the code war becomes no more of a threat than a literal pissing contest.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
... and let me tell you, if Cyber War replaces Cold War, they are winning this time...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Is the army protecting us from this?
I.e. in the advent of a cyberwar will our army do anything to protect private infrastructure like the electricity supply or the banking system from harm?
Right now: No.
The book to read on this is "Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It" by Richard A. Clarke. A great read and very scary.
So do I.
Let me know when it happens, will you?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Only if done properly.
Sure, but this applies to every engineering solution ever, no?
How much (if any) does this negate his whistleblowing about domestic surveillance?
Not at all, just because something immoral is being done for a strategic military reason does not make it more moral.
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This.
This isn't a war between Us and Them where we race to break each other's stuff.
This is a war between people who would like to use computers to build nifty stuff to make people's lives better, and people who would like to break other people's computers to advance their political agendas.
exactly I want my Hoverboard, flying car, and FTL drive.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Buffer overflows are one important class of vulnerability. They are also fairly easy to prevent /detect in new code. Use strncpy, not strcpy, etc. Static analysis can flag the dangerous constructs 99.9% of the time.
Java and C# are vulnerable to other, less readily identified vulnerabilities because key parts of the operations are hidden in the libraries and programmers are not accustomed to thinking about them. Both can easily have vulnerablities from memory management problems, but they can be harder to positively identify, especially for the typical .net programmer who doesn't normally think about memory management at all.
I'm having trouble finding the right words to express the issue. Imagine cars had a automatic steering mode that worked 99.9% of the time - there was rarely any need to touch the wheel. We can picture young people who learn to drive in these cars would have their hands full while driving, saying "why shouldn't I be texting and eating, the car steers itself". Then that 0.1% would happen - every three years they'd crash into something because they don't even think about steering. .Net memory management is just like that - it works well enough, often enough, that most .Net programmers don't bother to learn under what conditions it doesn't work automatically, and what their code needs to allow it to work as designed. Every so often, it causes .net programs to crash or corrupt data on accident. Beyond accidents, someone actively attacking memory management flaws in a .net application can easily cause damage, just as they can with errors in using the more direct memory management practices.
Rational people look at the polling statistics of how many (ethnic) Russians in Ukraine actually want to become a part of Russia. Support for joining Russia has never broke 30% in Eastern Ukraine even with widespread anger and disappointment at the new government.
Even in Crimea, where earlier polling suggests only a slight majority wanted to join Russia (ignore the referendum which was organized quickly to avoid scrutiny, and which was boycotted by many ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars), one state taking territory from another -- as opposed to a reasonable compromise of letting the region become independent -- on the basis of a mere slight majority is hardly fair.
... mission-critical things like banking and providing essential government services should "play it conservatively" and not be at the forefront of technology.
OR, where it makes sense for them to be at the forefront, the "old way of doing things" should be kept around until after the "new" way has proven it is robust enough for the task.
Being "robust enough for the task" means, among other things, not having unacceptable levels of downtime under normal or abnormal-but-common conditions (such as DDOS attacks) and having an acceptable and well-tested contingency plan when the unexpected or expected-but-rare event happens (such as a large earthquake taking out your primary and backup data centers and most of your communications, leaving only your "hardened" disaster-response and other "can't-fail during a public emergency" systems mostly intact).
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Code war: What the US and the Soviet Union had during the nasopharyngitis outbreaks of the 1950s through the 1980s.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Of course instead of laying off everyone in sight in favor of making everything "web-based" and "self-service" major corps and governments might try using people to deal with people but of course that cuts into bonuses and dividends...
Imagine a 9/11 style attack, or a "poison gas in the subway", but at the same time they take out both the cell phone network and the most important radio trunking system used by first responders. The next day, the bad guys trigger the New York blackout.
Or, think back to how the US won the cold war - slowly, gradually, by economically outperforming the Soviets. The US is already the target of sustained, large scale attacks. If those attacks improve to the point that it costs 1%-3% of GDP in defense or damages, over ten years SIGNIFICANTLY changes the international balance of power.